﻿Nitzavim: Bridging the Generation Gap

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This week:
Bechukotai

The time will come, the Torah assures us, when God will bring the
Jewish people back to the land of their ancestors. In the Land of
Israel, they will learn to fully love God and keep His
commandments:

“God will remove the barriers from your hearts and from your
descendants’ hearts, so that you will love the Lord your God with all
your heart and soul... .” (Deut. 30:6)

Why does the verse mention both “your hearts” and “your
descendants’ hearts”? Do the parents and children have different
hearts?

In fact, their hearts are different. Each generation has its
own intellectual, emotional, and spiritual yearnings. Each
generation has its own hurdles and barriers to be overcome. While the
fundamental content of the Torah does not change — it is still the
same divine Torah from Sinai — its style and exposition must
meet the needs of the day.

The prophet Elijah, harbinger of the redemption, will know how to
reach out to each generation in its own language. He will succeed
in bringing them together, and thus fulfill his mission to “restore
the heart of fathers to the children, and the heart of the children
to their fathers” (Malachi 3:24).

Torah for Our Time

Rav Kook was profoundly disturbed by the widespread abandonment of
religious observance by the young people of his time. He frequently
pleaded for the creation of a renascent literature to reach out to
the younger generation. In a letter from 1913, for example, he
wrote:

“We must translate our entire sacred treasury according to the
contemporary style of writing. Almost the entire body of Jewish
knowledge and sentiments must be made accessible to the people of
our time.”

In the days of the return from Babylonian exile, Ezra switched the
script of the Torah from the paleo-Hebrew characters to the letters
that we use today, the more aesthetically pleasing Assyrian script
(Sanhedrin 21b). One reason for doing so was in order to help his
generation appreciate and connect to the Torah. We live in a
similar age, when the exiled Jews returning to their homeland are
often detached from their spiritual heritage. Ezra’s initiative is
an apt metaphor for the current need to present the Torah in a
language and style suitable for our time, while preserving its inner content.